May 15, 2007

A religion (according to some writers)is a set of beliefs and practices generally held by a community, involving adherence to codified beliefs and rituals and study of ancestral or cultural traditions, writings, history, and mythology, as well as personal faith and mystic experience.Many Muslims (and some non-Muslim) observers claim that there are more practicing Muslims than practicing Christians in the world. We has no reason to dispute this. It seems likely, but we would point out that there are different opinions on the matter, and a Muslim may define “practicing” differently than a Christian….

Other sources quoted in this article put the percentages of various countries’ populations who rank Religion (any denomination) as “Very Important” at small fractions of those used to compile the table below[16]]. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Chinese folk religion and Buddhism are the largest world religions today. Approximately 69-78% of humanity adheres to one of these five religions[citation needed]. Christianity is the religion with the largest number of adherents, followed by Islam, Hinduism, Chinese folk religion and Buddhism respectively. However, the third-largest “group” of approximately 1 billion people do not adhere to religious approaches. Their irreligious approaches include Humanism, Atheism, Rationalism, and Agnosticism. These figures are necessarily approximate: note that the figures in the following table total nearly 7 billion people, yet the world population was only 6.4 billion (2005),[17] and a person can claim adherency to more than one religion[citation needed].